Rosemarie Adcock - Painting, Drawing & Printmaking

A number of years ago I began developing a series of paintings in monumental format, a specialty of painting I grew to love as a result of my study in Germany. Having been classically trained, I was equipped to move towards a freer sort of painting which I can best manage in a larger format. The larger paintings lend themselves to spontaneity in the form and anatomy of figures, or rich fabrics and patterns, both of which evolve as I paint them. I emphasize movement and intense color, but at the same time, maintain the planned order necessary to create complicated compositions filled with symbolism. In my Biblical paintings, I seek to teach several stories at once by showing how and why images and symbols connect across the many pages in the Old and New Testament Scriptures that form a breathtaking harmony spanning time from the beginning.

My art studies were in three schools that embraced three totally different philosophies of teaching. My earliest study was at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, and I later went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and Drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago. At the first school I learned to paint, at the second I learned to think more deeply about my painting as it related to the history of art in the centuries before me.

It was finally at the State Academy of Fine Art in Karlsruhe, Germany that I found my own voice working on massive canvases the size of walls. Ultimately I combined my classical influence with the freedom of my spontaneous compositions and figures. Blending these flowing compositions with refined detail has become nothing short of exhilarating for me as an artist.

My smaller works, paintings of life around me, are usually as vivid in color as my larger compositions, but the flowing lines can be seen within the subjects themselves, rather than forming the spatial relationships between the compositional elements of the larger paintings. In essence, large compositions or smaller works from life come together much in the same way.

Ultimately, it is my desire to draw my viewers into the beauty of a colorful composition as though they were entering a new world. It is also my passion to share an ancient faith in a fresh and vibrant way, displaying a part ancient, part future story, wherein we dwell connected to the entire narrative.

Rosemarie Adcock

Biography

Rosemarie Adcock was born weeks after her family immigrated to the United States from Germany and Austria through Canada. She studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago (1978-80) under Eugene Hall, an apprentice of the Russian painter, Alexander Zlatoff-Mirsky, who was himself an apprentice to the Russian master, Ilya Repin. She also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 1987). She received a stipend from the Minister of Culture of Baden-Wurtenberg, Germany, and studied printmaking and monumental painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe (1986-88) under the director Klaus Arnold, and also Max Neumann, guest professor for the class of Markus Lupertz.

Her exhibition of over 120 paintings of Russian peasants toured in the United States and Western Europe for over 7 years. After the resulting acquisition of humanitarian relief assistance of over $1.25 million in gift-in-kind donations for orphans and impoverished Russian families, the artist founded the charitable organization, Arts for Relief and Missions in 1993.

The artist’s current work is a series of biblical and allegorical oil paintings exploring rich color, lush garden settings and expressive figures. The artist’s paintings are in numerous private and corporate collections in the United States and Western and Eastern Europe. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe; including shows at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Museum for Florida Women Artists and twice at the Museum of Florida Art where her work received awards on both occasions. She lives with her husband, Ed, in Peoria, Illinois.